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Comment by _wmd | Hacker News Reader

(deleted useful feedback but ultimately neggy comment -- sorry, these guys are launching an app, I don't want to shit on that in a top comment where it's the reader's first experience).

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> - Opens in App Store, which gets stuck (as always) asking me for billing info.

> - Rustle around for PayPal password. Why not just provide a .dmg?

> - +4 minutes, finally get App Store working. Download.

This seems to be more a complaint about your operating system than the app.

No, it's a complaint about the availability of the app itself. You're not forced to use the App Store and most freeware is offered both in and out of it.

I gave Winds 2.0 a look last week and had the same experience. It took like 5 minutes just to get a download link and it takes me to the App Store where I have to sign-in (after signing in to LastPass and pulling out my phone for 2FA). Then I finally get it installed and immediately get asked to register for yet another account.

It's a pretty app, but the install process was terrible and it's honestly not a great RSS reader. It's a worse version of Flipboard with somehow less control over the content you see.

> You're not forced to use the App Store

Is this true if you're a developer? I've stayed away from macs because you need xcode to get any sort of dev tools and xcode is only available on the App store (at least this was the case the last time I tried to develop on a mac).

I meant for providing your apps to users. Apple's software is only available via the App Store, but you can put your app up for download anywhere you want. As an example, Slack can be downloaded from both their site or via the App Store. [1]

[1]: https://slack.com/downloads/osx

XCode is through the app store AFAIK, but CLI tools are available without it, and have been so for at least a couple years now.

Also there are a few other IDEs that do their own thing, it's objective-c and that's a language with multiple implementations (though one overwhelmingly popular one, obv). E.g. AppCode has been around for a while: https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

Xcode doesn't need to come from the App Store, it can also be downloaded from the Apple website: https://developer.apple.com/download/more/

I'd like to know why I should download and install this when I can use Feedly. Maybe it's uncool to like Feedly nowadays, but it does everything I want it to do. Before that I used Google Reader until it was retired.

Both Feedly and Flipboard seemed far better in my brief usage of Winds last week.

> Maybe it's uncool to like Feedly nowadays

Argh, when did this happen? I've been a big Feedly fan since the death of G Reader.

Who cares? I like feedly because it filled the hole left by Google reader and it does what I need. I've never been cool.

I hate Feedly's UI. Sorry

I had the same opinion. So few months back I made an iOS app to read all my favourite sites in one place https://7web.co

What is it that you don't like about the UI?

The DMG is available here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/winds-2.0-releases/releases/Winds-2...

We'll start to link this on the download page. Other users had the same experience. I like the idea of auto updates on the app store. But yeah...

Thanks for the feedback on the onboarding flow. We're changing that to make it optional. RSS parsing is done on the server to allow for future mobile releases.

There is no monetization planned for Winds. It started out as an example app for getstream.io and gradually became more popular, which is kinda cool. Again, we don't intend to make money on Winds. As long as it doesn't get too crazy we'll even keep on allowing free new signups on the hosted version.

Yeah, I'd strongly recommend considering the app store as a high-complexity and high-cost alternate channel. Can be useful for exposure and trust, but the infinite company blog posts about the difficulties of dealing with it / the inflexibility on pricing structures / etc really haven't changed since it was introduced. And sandboxing / IPC limitations / etc get added with OS updates, and that causes a new round of breakages in any app doing anything even remotely non-standard (could be in a lib!).

An important alternate, but probably not a good idea to make it the sole channel.

... to upvote for "thanks for thinking about this!" but that encourages it to stay at the top, or to ignore and hope it falls, or....

you're making life difficult. stop being reasonable.

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